Since this Easter season began, I’ve been struck in a new way with a particular mystery of the Resurrection: the beauty of a new kind of life that God brings about through death. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about the very genuine kind of death involved in surrendering our own will—our own personal “chooser”—to God. Though there is a sort of death involved in such surrender, there is also—and just as genuinely—a new kind of life birthed in the process. How amazingly beautiful and paradoxical!

There is a mysterious kind of goodness unlocked when we—without seeing the details we’d (really!) like to see—intentionally take God’s path, rather than our own. While we tend to settle for safe, we find such surrender to be good. We even find it to be best—unanticipated and unmatched by what we could’ve thought up on our own. And after some practice, we come to discovering that learning to walk in the goodness of God’s heartbeat for our lives and is actually the best thing we could ever decide to do.

This week, ask yourself this: is there something in my life that I am not allowing God to direct in a way that is not my first choice? If so, talk to God about it and I challenge you to take the step of faith in trusting that his path just may be better than what you could’ve thought up on your own.